Internet & World Wide Web How to Program (3rd Edition) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This book overall is the best general introduction to website development technologies that I've found. I'm coming from the perspective of a professor who needed to teach HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any server-side scripting language to my students. After deciding to use PHP, I loked for several appropriate books, and I did find numerous good options, but at the very most, any given book would only cover two of the technologies I needed. Thus, I would end up with at least three or four books that had way more than necessary and would cost up to $200 for one course.
Eventually I discovered Deitel's all-in-wonder, and found an excellent textbook that includes every possible Web technology that I might consider in one reasonably priced book. It has at least one introductory chapter on every technology. Note that everything in the book is simply introductory--very appropriate for a first-level course. It serves as a life-time reference that helps a student or Web developer enter into any given Web technology in a tutorial format. However, to get more advanced, the developer will absolutely have to find a dedicated book on the technology of interest--this book is not for advanced topics; it just gets you in the door--but productively so!
Specifically, the book has at least one full introductory chapter (sometimes two) on: XHTML, CSS, Flash, Dreamweaver, XML, ASP.NET, Perl, PHP, and Coldfusion. It has 10 full chapters on JavaScript that fully teach a non-programmer from scratch how to program (hence the title of the book)--however, I have serious disagreement with their Microsoft-centric approach, as I mention below. The book also has a chapter each on web graphics, web servers, and databases.
In addition, the book includes a CD with complete PDF chapters on VBScript, ASP (not .NET), Python, JSP, and lots more. The chapters are clear, and the authors make a good selection of the most important and useful functions and features, that give students a solid base to get on their feet web programming.
However, the book has one very serious systematic flaw: The writers only used Internet Explorer and completely ignored compatibility with other browsers. I strongly emphasize to my students programming for Web standards, and this is very difficult to do with this book--in fact, it is impossible the way they teach JavaScript. Many of their code examples simply will not work with browsers that follow W3C standards such as Firefox and Opera. I eventually had to give up on teaching students work-arounds for the book's code, and just gave in to Microsoft. Obviously, this is not an acceptable compromise for some people, so this book might be disqualified for this one reason alone. However, I find the book extremely valuable nonetheless--for this reason the book does not deserve five stars.
For my purposes, it is the best choice available, and if not for its exclusive focus on Microsoft Internet Explorer, it would be a near-perfect introductory book on every significant web technology.

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The goal of this comprehensive book is to introduce readers with little or no programming experience to the exciting world of Web-based applications by teaching the fundamentals needed to program on the Internet. Hundreds of LIVE-CODE examples (i.e., complete, working programs) of real applications throughout the book and on the accompanying CD allow readers to run the applications and see and hear the outputs. The authors instruct readers about incorporating multimedia into Web pages and Web-based applications to enhance the presentation of online content.Contains coverage of introductory programming principles, various markup languages (XHTML, Dynamic HTML and XML), several scripting languages (JavaScript, VBScript, Perl, Python, PHP, ColdFusion and Flash ActionScript), Web servers (IIS and Apache) and relational databases (MySQL). New in this edition are chapters on Macromedia ColdFusion and Macromedia Dreamweaver.For novice programmers who want to get started building real-world, industrial-strength, Web-based applications.

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